January 14, 2010

Windows 2008 and time Sync W32time

After migrating domain controllers on ESX environment (-:, ps: I have tried to convince for hyperV but did not worked out in this one.) we saw time on the domain controllers were off and made some adjustment to make PDC happy. I wanted to share here what we have done to fix the issue.

if you are not familiar with time service on the PDC emulator I recommend start reading it from Ace Fekay’s blog ( AD MVP ) excellent & well written article.

My issue started as “outlook is sending e-mails , 6hr behind the current time”

I think in the process of thinking locally, Outlook is a software installed on a workstation OS ( winXP, Vista, Win7 etc) and it reads time from OS itself

Workstation OS ( client PC’s) is talking to domain controller they authenticated against. The domain controllers gets their time (Sync) from PDC emulator ( domain controller holds the PDC emulator role) and finally PDC gets ( should configured to external time source) its time from external time source.

Outlook—-sync——> Work Station OS—-sync—–>DC

DC—-sync——–> PDC

PDC——-sync——>External Time source.

Ok now back to the issue, how to configure PDC to sync its time from external time server? here is everything you need to know or do to make it work, KB816042

After you make this changes the PDC register will like this

W32Time configures the list of time sources through the following key

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE

SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet

Services

W32Time

Parameters

NtpServer

time.windows.com,0x01 time.nist.gov,0x01

Click here to download reg file which will do this for you automatically